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A clean start for the web (2020)

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Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#61

Post by lifthrasiir »

virchau13 wrote: post #59
lifthrasiir wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can fall under any of these with minimal changes, so your question is not very meaningful. I'd say it is better suited for the application web though, because you expect interactivity. The point here is that there are not many documents that do necessarily need interactivity.

But that article is exactly what we want on the internet. It's the kind of interactive teaching demonstrations that forward looking educators have been thinking about for decades. It's not bloated or overdone; it doesn't take up significantly more processing power; it works far better than a traditional article ever could. This is what we desire the internet to be like. It's because of articles like this one, or 3Blu…

Don't get me wrong, I like interactive documents a lot, but they also take a lot of time and effort to produce and thus will remain a minority. Texts greatly outweigh every other medium primarily because they are very easy to produce and distribute.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#62

Post by qudat »

I also had similar thoughts without the eloquence of this article. The one area I disagree with the author is:

> Rule #1 is don’t make a subset. If the replacement for the web is just whatever features were in Firefox 10 years ago, it’s not going to be a compelling vision.

If you don't want a subset, and you like markdown, then gemini seems like the answer. It is definitely gaining popularity but I'm not convinced it's enough to convert the general audience.

I think supporting everything but javascript for the "document browser" would automatically enable a ton of websites and make it easier for creators and consumers to use the tools and languages they already understand.

https://erock.lists.sh/browser-monopoly

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#64

Post by dmje »

It's strange but as - I suppose "veteran" (sigh) Web guy, I just don't see the problem of building stuff(+) in html, css and maybe a sprinkling of js + PHP or whatever else serverside if you need it.

(+) stuff for me = websites, not web applications.

For Web applications, maybe all this vue / react / whatever stuff is worthwhile, I don't know, I'm not qualified to know (although let's face it, developers possibly might have a slight tendency to maybe over complicate things...just sometimes...)

But I struggle to see what in a normal website experience isn't more than provided by these basic tools.

Oh, and great content. None of any of this matters if you can't write...

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#65

Post by 6keZbCECT2uB »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #31
fennecs wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it have to be so siloed? What if I want documents with a slight bit of inactivity? Why must I go through two different protocols? What if I want to read a paper next to the Juyter notebook that made it? I think it should be the clients job to take whatever slice of a richer universe it wants. This also stops duplication of effort, why maintain separate protocols and clients etc. It’s just a search issue, the…

The problem with "one client to rule them all" is a massive lost of consistency, speed/responsiveness, and usability when it comes to documents. On the web, documents can come in anything ranging from the form of a tiny text file to a gargantuan "app" that weighs tens of megabytes and spins up your laptop's fans to render. It also means that the browser isn't nearly as smart as it could be because it has to be a gene…

I find this compelling, but the lines feel blurry to me. For example, take Hacker News. When I read hacker news, it's both static and simple. But, if I want to make a comment, suddenly I need authentication and a text box. So, does all of Hacker News have to be in an application web to support comments? Do I have to use two different applications to read or submit comments?

Next level of complexity might be form entry. Say I want to buy tickets for a conference, and need to submit my credit card information, phone number, address, etc. We already have authorization from HN, but are the credit card and phone number boxes just plain text boxes? No validation or interactive feedback until I POST? When I enter my address, do I get a map of where that is so that I don't confuse N xx-th St NYC with xx-th St NYC, one of which is in Brooklyn and one of which is in Manhattan?

On the flip side in the application web, when I'm doing my banking. If you go all the way to pixels, how does my accessibility reader handle it?

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#66

Post by rektide »

grishka wrote: post #35
fennecs wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it have to be so siloed? What if I want documents with a slight bit of inactivity? Why must I go through two different protocols? What if I want to read a paper next to the Juyter notebook that made it? I think it should be the clients job to take whatever slice of a richer universe it wants. This also stops duplication of effort, why maintain separate protocols and clients etc. It’s just a search issue, the…

> What if I want documents with a slight bit of inactivity? Then you use Adobe Flash. See, we used to have a decent technology for when you want "a document with a slight bit of interactivity". It worked very well for this exact purpose. More than 10 years later, browsers' native capabilities, that are supposed to be a replacement for what Flash offered, have still not quite caught up. Moreover, Flash defined a clear…

This sort of "wouldnt it be great to have some other thing, so we can murder the rest of the web platform" is so grotesque to me, just repugnant & vile & cruel.

Flash is a comedically shit technology. There's a couple animation capabilities it had that were nice & simple & people adore it endlessly for that. But Flash hated users, gave them nothing, no power (alike a native app) & was a big proprietary anti-hypermedia ball of jank, and it had the most trashfire craptastic lack of accessibility one could ever imagine.

This desire to keep hypermedia down, to create hard walls between different purposes of apps... it feels poisonous & misguided. There is too much of the web today thay does abuse client side code too much. But frankly it rarely affects most people, there's still viable techniques for manipulating it (except for Flutter's CanvasKit which is an abomination more cursed than Flash), and honestly, we're still getting better at webdev, still learning, still emerging better libraries & best practices, & generally the urge to do better is here & slowly happening.

There's some really dark takes that we have to save the web from apps. That we should bring back Flash is one of the most unforutnate least justified most tragic hot takes I've heard though.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#67

Post by imiric »

The problems with the modern web are hardly technical. We have the technology to make it better.

There is a single major problem: advertising. It is the default monetization path for most of the web, and it has become an unstoppable force of sites that are hostile to the user, siphon as much user data as possible, and use every marketing tactic available to trick the user into clicking on ads or agreeing to being tracked.

It has spawned a multi-billion dollar market of shady data brokers that sell user data to the highest bidder, and built an industry of adtech giants.

It has required passing laws to protect the user, and even those were late, not strict enough, impossible to enforce, and only available in small regions of the world.

It is pervasive and offensive, and this has to change. Progress is very slow on this front, but we need new monetization options that are as easy to use for both the user and content creator, and respect the user and their privacy rights.

Say what you want about Brave Inc., the BAT[1] is the most compelling of such alternatives. It currently uses user-friendly ads, but those can be bypassed by funding the wallet instead.

I'm curious about other alternatives to advertising, not about another web framework.

[1]: https://basicattentiontoken.org/

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#68

Post by bruce511 »

EddieDante wrote: post #13
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #3

Do we really want to continue having "a web" ? Remember, "the web" was never designed for what we do with it today. If you're thinking of overhauling "the web", I think it makes sense to start from first principles, and build something that meets today's needs with the least amount of unnecessary bullshit. You have to start from the user's experience, because nothing else matters about a computer other than what you…

> Do we really want to continue having "a web"? Speaking only for myself, I'm not at all invested in having a website . Yes, I want a publicly accessible site of my own on the internet with which to share documents, and I currently do so over HTTP, but I would equally happy to share them over Gopher or even anonymous FTP. However, I'd rather pay NearlyFreeSpeech.net for hosting than run my own VPS or self-host on a m…

You want a publically accessible place for your public persona. You have got that. Why do you care about the protocol it uses? Why would you prefer a protocol that no one else uses? That no one has a client for?

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#69

Post by bruce511 »

bawolff wrote: post #19

I think the post misunderstands the situation. Its not 100% clear to me what the author's thesis is - but i think its that ever incrasing complexity of web standards results in bad user experience. I dont think that is true - or as they say correlation does not equal causation. The web used to be smaller and the corporate world didn't know what to do with it. It was creative and original. Eventually corporate america…

I agree. There have been numerous posts along these lines which seem to misunderstand the issue.

The post hypothesis is that [something is wrong with the Web] because [browser functionality]. But it's not browser functionality that is the issue here, it's the site author. The premise of the problem is wrong, thus the proposed solution makes no sense, and it will fail.

This is easy to demonstrate. Install a second browser. Turn off JavaScript completely. Disable cookies completely. You now have your minimal document viewer. Done. No need for a new protocol, no need to create anything.

Now feel free to view all your static-site destinations in this. It'll be rocking fast. Then use your regular browser for everything else.

I suspect you'll find that the browser is not the problem. The problem is that the sites you want to visit use JavaScript. You'll discover that your alternate browser is basically not used. Oh and that the sites it can use are equally fast in your main browser.

The browser is not slow. Sites _choose_ to be slow as the cost of other things they want (mostly advertising). Any site you think is slow in your browser would not be in your other Web.

Do new developers choose inappropriate tools to build simple stuff? Yes of course. Do they go with what they know best, yes of course. Do most senior developers do the same thing? Of course yes.

Is the solution a new protocol and a new browser? I fail to see how this would change anything.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#70

Post by arbenpurben »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #30

What we need is for HTML to get going as a hypermedia again, to make the hypermedia architecture viable for a larger set of web applications. It's been stalled at anchors and forms (with only GET and POST!) for decades now. It's astounding how much we got built with just that. I'm trying to show where it could go with htmx: https://htmx.org Hypermedia (in particular the uniform interface) is what made the web special…

This. This gets us 98% of the way. The people that have to worry about the 2% are not you, because your web app almost certainly doesn’t need offline-first of FPS-like user interaction, so in 98% of cases, hypermedia + tech like htmx gets you 100% of the way.

For pete’s sake, just let your server serve html. Replace only the parts of the page that need to update… with html. From your server. The poor thing is just sitting there, idling, bored, borderline depressed because it doesn’t get much of chance to do what it is meant to do, which is, you know… serve. “But it serves JSON” … is like buying a Bugatti Veyron, just to park it in your garage and use its exhaust fumes to dry your clothes 6 days of the week, with a 2 minute drive around the block on Sundays.

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